In Memoriam: Paula Stamps
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Paula L. Stamps, Professor Emerita of Health Promotion and Policy, passed away on March 22, 2024.
Stamps joined the UMass Amherst faculty in 1972, serving as a faculty member in the Health Policy and Management program for over 30 years. She also served as a member of the then School of Health Sciences' leadership team, first as program head for Health Services Administration program from 1982-84, and later, as acting director of the Division of Public Health and program head for Health Policy and Management program from 1987-88.
Beginning in 2009, and continuing through her retirement from teaching in 2013, she served as graduate program director, first for the school's Department of Public Health, and later, the Departments of Biostatistics and Epidemiology and Health Promotion and Policy. She retired from those duties in 2022.
In this capacity, Stamps had an immeasurable impact on the countless number of graduate and undergraduate students she worked with, instructed, and mentored. Over the years, she taught courses such as Foundations of Public Health, the popular Gen Ed course Health Care for All: Myths and Realities, Emergency Preparedness: From Policy to Practical Issues, and following the attack on 9/11, Bioterrorism and Challenges to Public Health. To those individuals who have taken her classes or benefited from her mentorship as graduate program director, she was more than a professor; she was a trusted friend and thoughtful ally. She was also a staunch advocate of increased student-faculty collaboration, both in teaching and in research.
“I loved Paula like family, and I am saddened by this loss to our community,” says Lawrence Pellegrini, a 2017 alumnus of the Health Policy and Management PhD program who currently serves as a senior lecturer in Health Policy and Management and director of the school’s Online MPH in Public Health Practice program. “She made significant and long-lasting contributions to the field of Public Health, the School of Public Health and Health Sciences, and to many individuals fortunate to have known her over the years. She was just an amazing person, and I will do everything I can to carry her memory forward.”
Stamps’ research career focused on the development of robust measures for some of the variables used to measure quality in health services research, primarily on the measure of satisfaction of patients with the care they receive and the level of occupational satisfaction of both physicians and nurses. She was best known for the development of a statistically valid attitude scale used to measure the level of occupational satisfaction of nurses in clinical settings. Her Index of Work Satisfaction (IWS) is used at the professional level to manage nurse turnover, which is very costly to hospital budgets. The IWS is now the standard measure used in many regional and local studies, and is one of the quality measures required by the Joint Commission on Accreditation for HealthCare Organizations. It is also used by the American Nursing Association to help certify "magnet" hospitals. In addition to its professional use, the IWS is used to link management strategies, nurse satisfaction, and patient outcomes, which permits more complex research questions to be addressed. The IWS has also been used internationally in over 35 countries.
She is the author of six books and dozens of peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters. Her practice-based activities included close collaborations with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health on a range of activities, including developing the state-wide emergency preparedness plan; developing and implementing state-wide training courses for public health and public safety professionals; becoming a member of the local Medical Reserve Corps; implementing and evaluating regional emergency simulations; being a member of the Town of Chesterfield's emergency response team.
Stamps received many honors during her lengthy career, being selected as a recipient of the UMass Amherst Distinguished Teaching Award in 1994 and a Community Service Learning Fellowship in 1996. Nationally, she notably received the American Nursing Association's Book of the Year Award twice, in 1987 and again in 1998, for her seminal work, Nurses and Work Satisfaction: An Index for Measurement (1st and 2nd editions, respectively). She served in both the Golden Key Honor Society and Delta Omega Honor Society.
Editor’s note: There will be a memorial service in Chesterfield, NH, later in the spring. Stamps’ obituary can be viewed online from the Daily Hampshire Gazette.